Story Threads: See You Up There

Eeeeeeh I'm back! It's been another year since the last post, so at least I am consistent with being late. Quick catch-up: I'm now married, will be working as a full-time reference librarian come the new year, and still love films. My writing is out of practice...bear with me, if you will. But hey, I changed the color theme on the blog, so at least that's somethin'.

"It's a long story. It's complicated."

—Albert Maillard

We've all heard the metaphor of a story being like a tapestry woven from many different threads. They come together to form a beautiful work of art, everything connected, each individual strand easy enough to follow when scrutinized independent of the others. The best works hold up when taken in from both vantages. Storytellers can create some masterfully complex tales, but at times I feel like they push the needle in the wrong direction. Sometimes a handful of threads—of connections—are forced for the sake of completing rather than complementing the whole. See You Up There is not alone in that regard, but it is regrettable all the same.

Rated 'tous publics'.
For those of us who did not take two years of French in high school,
just know that there's a teeny bit of nudity, war violence & injuries,
swearing, and a dude breathing into the maw of a freshly dead horse.

I still really enjoyed Au revoir là-haut; I decided to watch it in the first place because the trailer looked whimsical and gritty. I like whimsy! And grittiness! The film came out in France in 2017 and was nominated for/won a bunch of awards shortly thereafter. Based on a novel of the same name by Pierre Lamaitre and adapted/directed by Albert Dupontel (who also plays narrator and main character Maillard), this film is even lauded by the most critical of critics: Rotten Tomatoes.

A rundown of the plot: November 9th, 1918. War-glutton and très villainous Pradelle damns his battalion by sending them to their slaughter one day before armistice. During the battle, Edouard Péricourt (played by the very talented Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) saves Maillard from his premature burial only to be injured himself. Maillard, in turn, saves Edouard, only Edouard is horribly disfigured and wants to die. Not wanting to face his estranged family, he begs his newfound friend to remove his war record, thereby faking his death. Maillard obliges and sends Edouard off to a fancy hospital in Paris to get a prosthetic jaw, only the pretty boy is too good for that and decides to live as a half-faced freak instead. Fair do's. Maillard has some stuff to deal with on his own, mainly the fact that he saw Pradelle shoot two of their own back on the battlefield. What's worse, Pradelle KNOWS that Maillard knows, so when Edouard's loving sister Madeleine shows up to claim her brother's corpse, the two strike a deal to cover each other's asses in exchange for not ratting the other out.

A year goes by. Down-on-his-luck Maillard has come back to Paris and is taking care of Edouard, the mighty morphine addict who decides to wallow in self-pity while Maillard works a shitty job and steals drugs from disabled veterans in the name of friendship. They eventually decide to con the state—currently high on hero worship—into paying for elaborate cenotaphs which they never intend to build. See, Edouard is an amazing artist who hates his coldhearted father Marcel for pushing him into joining the war rather than into pursuing the life that he once wanted. Since both ex-soldiers are bitter about what they went through, the qualms about the con are few.

Also, Edouard wears masks now. Pfft, arty types.

Meanwhile, Pradelle is making money off of the improper burials of his fellow fallen soldiers. He is also connected to Edouard's father...precisely how is never made clear, but daddy Péricourt is rich and powerful and perturbed by his son's apparent death as well as their missed opportunity for reconciliation. Maillard, having lied to the Péricourt family about his friend's supposed death, again meets with Madeleine who, as it turns out, has married Pradelle. Whaaat. Edouard eventually finds out about this, falls deeper into depression, and takes his revenge on Pradelle by sending a state inspector after his macabre business. Maillard takes a job as a bookkeeper for Marcel and begins to steal money from the profiteers at his bank. Oh, also, in what I assume was an attempt to honor his late son, Marcel throws a contest to design a massive memorial with a grand prize of one hundred fifty thousand francs. Lo and behold, Edouard wins this competition under a false name, but Marcel is suspicious since lil' ol' Eddie still uses his original signature on all of his work. D'oh!

For glory?

There's a subplot with an orphan girl who becomes close to Edouard, another with a love interest for Maillard, but the main ending is as follows: Madeleine only married Pradelle to be with child and soon dumps his cheating ass (as if he weren't bad enough, the prick sleeps around). Maillard confesses his con to his rando lady-love then goes a bit nuts and 'accidentally' kills Pradelle by burying him alive with a horse mask (extreme irony, believe me). Marcel tracks down the artist who has conned so many as well as taken the prize money, realizes it is his son, and has a cathartic dialog with him. Edouard is pretty much out of his mind on morphine at this point but hugs his father before jumping off a building to his death. There is a 'second ending', which was dumb in that it tried to tie up loose ends by forcing events to come full circle, and unfortunately that is what left the largest impression on my mind. The threads of this story came together in too many ways. They got tangled up, and the tapestry wasn't ruined so much as made messier.

There are plenty of other things that this movie did really well, though. The idea that the fates of so many rest on the shoulders on a handful of influential idiots is as relevant now as it was during WWI. Maillard reasons that he did not speak up against Pradelle simply by shrugging and saying "Orders are orders," a mindset that has plagued many jingoistic nations throughout history. Even after all that he went through, he still had to refer to Pradelle as 'sir' for propriety's sake. It is this lack of willingness to go against the grain that spurs Maillard's decision to go off the deep end so wholeheartedly and take part in Edouard's plans. His actions are almost understandable with this in mind. After all, he openly admits, "All war taught me was to fight innocent men. So I did just that." The audience is all but cajoled into taking his side, too, given that his nemesis is such a scoundrel. I mean...early on, Pradelle skips across the graves of his comrades so as not to muddy his shoes (in a very literal sense).

What a wanker.

Similarly, the ever-present 'make art, not war' motto present throughout the film stuck some cords. For one, Edouard literally spoke through his art, although what he had to say was somewhat duplicitous. At times it was startlingly on point ('Vive la mort!), but when it came to his con, each memorial's patriotic title—from 'The Grateful Nation' and 'Joy in Battle' to 'Thanks for Everything' and 'Proud to Die'—followed quickly by a price tag and his own chortling made it obvious that his creations were a complete farce. They still fooled pretty much everybody, though, which is the point. "Publicity for death," as Edouard would say. These characters are bitter, and a touch mad, and it shows. For instance, when Madeleine comes to invite Maillard to a family dinner and share memories of Edouard, she states simply, "You were with my brother when he died." Edouard, not knowing that she is right outside his abode, has a laughing fit with the orphan girl Louise. The action is absurd given the circumstances, and even Maillard is aghast as he tries to provide the appropriate cover to the unknowing Madeleine. It's those subtleties which give me life, not the big signposts displaying the words 'See? Look here! Isn't what we did clever?' that make up the vast majority of this story.

I legit love these two, tho. <3

So, did I like this film despite its unnecessary complexities? Yeah, actually, a lot. The 'whimsy' I wrote of earlier is very French in nature and reminded me of Amélie and Mood Indigo, at least with the cinematography and aesthetics if not exactly story-wise. I especially like Edouard's friendship with Louise and how it illuminates the large part of him that never grew up. She accepts him with innocence, but of course things are never that simple. Edouard is a complex creature, one who decries his father's lifestyle yet thrives only on opulence. At one point he makes a mask out of paper bills, and his final visage is that of a peacock. You can draw your own conclusions about that symbolism.

An artist with his head in the clouds, or just a wasteful fop? You decide!

Maillard recognizes this trait in his friend but takes it in stride. "I told Edouard I had a job. He didn't ask where. Rich people think others ought to work." It seems that only the rich can afford to be whimsical, eh? Edouard has no idea—or, more likely, does not care to understand—what is involved to keep his lifestyle going. He came up with the grand plan, but like so many geniuses he does not care about the smaller details. Maillard's job enables them to run their con by obtaining the funds to print up catalogs, open bank accounts under false names without raising suspicion, make large withdrawals of cash, etc. Edouard takes everything for granted. It is also his hubris as an artist that tips off his father about the identify of the man behind the mask. His sister Madeleine acts similarly, using Pradelle as it suits her only to toss him aside when she is done with him...although the asshole absolutely deserved it, no doubt about that. See You Up There raises these issues of classism, at two points giving the audience a glimpse of the upstairs v. downstairs mentality that so permeated the era during which the story takes place (Marcel talking down to Maillard on the landing as he offers him a job, Padelle smoking halfway down the same stairway after he is left low by Madeleine's harsh but true words). This was overt, and even though the audience does not have to dig deeply to understand what is being said, the message itself is fairly timeless.

I was never any good at writing conclusions. Ta-da! Le fin. See you next year, maybe. ;)

For further information:

• See You Up There on IMDb

The (Un)importance of Sound: The Shape of Water

Well, this is a surprise. End of 2017, I was taking a break from watching the yearly Jingle Jam and decided to look through the ol' blog to check for broken video embeds. I noticed that some things had changed in the fifteen months since I'd let the site go dormant. Namely, on the dash there is now a view-stat counter next to each post and, believe it or not, the last twenty-five entries on Rachel's Feature Presentations have over two thousand hits apiece. Whaaaat?! Turns out people have been reading this stuff all along! Well, at least since about three years ago, anyway. Still! Very cool. Cool cool cool.

Hot dang, would'ya look at that!

It’s probably just a fluke, like loads of spambots or whatevs, and even then in the grand scheme of the Internet anything less than half a mil is meh as far as popularity goes, right? But I’m stoked about it. Maybe kids from the latest generation of middle schoolers have been using my blog as a non-academic source in their bibliographies for a class they don't want to attend. Maybe a film club consisting of five middle-aged gents and their cats stumbled onto my Populaire post one day and have been using the blog as a bible ever since—if so, sucks to be them. Maybe it’s just one weird person on the other side of the world clicking on every post over and over again to earn Bitcoin. (I'm not really 100% on how cryptocurrency is earned). Regardless! Considering I didn’t actually give permission for this blog to show up on search engines until after my original film studies course ended (circa Jan. 2014), I'd say the traction gained since then is pretty darn impressive! Dunno how ya'll have been finding this, since Blogger doesn't have user-added SEO features apart from tags...although, yup, right there on the draft sidebar I see a 'Search Description' box. That's new. Huh. So, now that I've finished insulting both the gracious host site that is Blogger as well as every single member of my potential readership, let's catch up a little.

I don't actually know who this actress(?) is. Is it presumptuous of me to think that a young,
manicured, objectively pretty white lady who looks like she's sitting for an interview is an actress? Probably.

It seems we are experiencing a lot of firsts today. As a case in point, it's unusual for me to share stuff about myself on the Web, but given the long leave of absence I sort of feel as though I owe an explanation. I called it quits with the blog in September 2016 right as I was starting my studies at university to get an MLIS—i.e., a master's in lib sci—with an IT concentration. Haven't graduated quite yet, but I'm on track to earn the degree this coming May, meaning that I will be a forever-slave to federal loan debt after less than a year and a half spent in school. Yaaaay. On the bright side, I started volunteering at a local library last summer, was hired on as a part-time page in the fall, and will now be moving up the ladder as a reference librarian intern once the new year hits, so I should be able to pay off that debt in, oh, let's say forty years' time? That's nice. What else...I'm still editing on a freelance-basis, but with a full course load, the new job, and everything else life has decided to throw my way production on that front has slowed drastically. I've dabbled in website creation for an electronic publishing class and professionally, my cat is still alive and as cute as ever, I'm soon to be wed to the absolute *loveliest* person in the world (the same man with whom I have already been lucky enough to be in a relationship for nearly a decade, I might add), and...oh, what's that? I should move on to the film critiquey portion of this post? If you insist. >_>

As long-time readers of this blog will know, I dig del Toro. No, not that one, although he's great, too, a totally underrated actor, I've liked his work since The Usual Suspects, though that's hard to watch now given the recent Spacey scandal—just yuck—but anyway did you see him as DJ in the latest episode of Star Wars? So awesome. But no, this one. I've done multiple other posts pertaining to this guy (most notably this and this). So, when my father offered to take me to see del Toro's latest flick on the big screen, I grabbed my Pale Man t-shirt, a box of Whoppers, and climbed aboard the choo choo train to fantasy land. Yeah, I know it's not really a 'foreign' or 'indie' film, but I feel like writing about it anyway. Plus I legit thought it was going to be in Spanish going in, having only seen this trailer beforehand. It did sort of throw me for a loop that some of the actors I knew to be American (and therefore native English speakers) were suddenly fluent in another language, but sometimes the brain just accepts stuff as true when it really, really wants it to be. Or it simply isn't quick enough to catch onto obvious overdubbing. Aaaanywho, let's get on with it!

Rated R cuz of naked people, sexy stuff, bursts of violence, and swearyness.

This is pretty much the only film I have ever seen in the cinema and then decided to write a post about afterward, i.e., I've owned copies of/could stream the others, so I don't have any screencaps, gifs, or even decent notes. What I do have are some hastily typed one-liners in the to-do list app on my phone, things I wrote out as quickly as possible so that the screen brightness wouldn't annoy my fellow moviegoers. Then I got immersed in the magic and, after about the first fifteen minutes of the total running time, I simply stopped adding notes altogether. Professional as always, aren't I? The listed items are as follows, verbatim:

• Alarm, voices (film), siren, bath tap, music, timer, etc.
• Whistling along to the music
• Blood on white marble

Not much to go on. Oh well. Let's knock these out one by one, shall we? I knew from the get-go that I wanted to discuss sound within the film, probably because it is revealed that the main character, Elisa, is mute and her inability to speak plays into the plot quite heavily. After the dream sequence-esque opening, we awaken with Elisa as her alarm clock goes off. Once she switches it off, we can hear muffled voices from what I had at first assumed was a neighboring flat but soon enough found out was actually from an early colorized film playing in the theater a floor below. Then there is a siren blaring from an ambulance as it zooms by outside; the chocolate factory is on fire, but we will not know this until she 'talks' with her neighbor in the scene which follows. Back in the present, however, Elisa is starting her day, turning on the tap in her bathroom, boiling water and winding up a timer to cook some eggs, tearing off a sheet from a daily wall calendar, opening a window to let in the city noise, and roughly shining her shoes all while non-diegetic music plays and swells in the background. The near cacophony of sounds paired with the just-too-close directorial shots makes everything move forward at an all but claustrophobic pace—establishing set dressing and character traits, sure, but also forcing the audience to understand that the motion of Elisa's day is forced like clockwork. The fact that she is often late for her job as part of old-timey Viscera Cleanup Detail speaks volumes.

After she leaves her residence, Elisa gets on the bus for work, whistling along to the still non-diegetic music as if she can hear beyond her small universe and eavesdrop on our own. She also seems just as able to drown out everything deemed unimportant to her specific story, like the national news playing on a television set as she pauses by a storefront window on her commute. This film's composer, Alexandre Desplat, has talked at length about how his music attempts to ease listeners into a blurring between fantasy and reality, a theme mirrored by The Shape of Water's story, its underwater setting (distorted sound), and the 1960s world setting with anachronistic AU highlights reminiscent of del Toro's other work Hellboy. I do not know much at all about music despite having learned to play the clarinet during fifth and sixth grade /brag, so I couldn't tell you how Desplat managed to convey the feeling of being surrounded by water—much less equate that with the more intoxicating feeling of being accepted and loved by another—on a technical scale with notes and chords and the like. I can, however, say that the OST is immersive in every sense of the word. When it comes to sound effects and music, they do a lot to make or break a visual story. When it comes to words, though...for much of the film, Elisa feels and is often treated like an outsider due to her damaged voice box. To her, the amphibian man represents love because he does not judge her based on the words she can or cannot say, for he himself is unable to communicate with coherent sound. He is alien to the rest of the world, but Elisa never seems to fear him because he is the closest to her personal standard of normal that she has ever encountered outside of her own self. To them, the intricacies of the spoken word are obsolete if not utterly meaningless.

Whew, got a little carried away by the romance of it all. Getting back to the list (I'm no good at transitions), the 'blood on white marble' refers to an uncomfortable scene that takes place in a workplace restroom. Elisa discovers that super creep/product-of-his-time-but-no-less-a-bigoted-arsehole/big baddie Richard Strickland has been torturing poor Mr. Fishy with an electric cattle prod. He rests it on the bathroom counter for a tic as he takes a whiz, and the scarlet blood on white marble reminded me of a very specific image from Cronos, one of del Toro's earliest works. Remember this discussion about eggs? In a recent interview, Desplat spoke about Elisa being "so thin, fragile, delicate" which is why he paired her with the whistling sound noted previously. I could be reaching here—as I so often do—but there's gotta be something in this particular character's 'fragility' paired with eggs, blood, and fish scales. No? Maybe that's symbolism for a different post at some point in the future, then.

And with that, I am calling this rather haphazard exercise to an end. That's one post for 2017, anyway, so don't harp on me too much. :P I would say that it is very probable there will be more of this kind of poorly thought-out, even more poorly structured bullshit in the future, but I'm well out of practice and currently busier than a beaver. There are so many fantastic films out there, though, and I have missed rambling about them in this format, so why the heck not? Talk to you then, whenever 'then' may be. It certainly won't be regularly. Soz. In the interim, enjoy an updated blogger bio. Woo!

For more information:

• The Shape of Water on IMDB

Until further notice...good-bye.

Hello readers,

It has been three whole years since this blog's inception. Now, fifty posts later, Rachel's Feature Presentations is being retired! [I will take this opportunity to admit I've always disliked that headline. Since this site was originally created for a college course, however, we students had to use our names as part of our titles so that we could identify each other more easily. Tch. I wanted to go with something much classier and alliterative, such as Long-Distance Drive-In, The Fabulous Flick Chick, or even something snappy like Genre Jaunt. Oh well.]

It was a nice, long run, but content has been dwindling down for a little while now, and real-life duties call. Along with my continued work as a freelance copyeditor, I will very soon be starting graduate school to study for an MLIS. So, for the foreseeable future, this blog is being discontinued. No worries, though: I am keeping the site up and will continue to keep an eye on things, so any & all comments are still welcome. I hope that you have all enjoyed my posts, and I would like to thank my readership for putting up with my often lengthy, usually obscure writings. :P

Anyway, who knows? Perhaps I will eventually resurrect this blog and publish once again.

Until then,

Rachel

Direction: Detectorists

"[Follows] the lives of two eccentric metal detectorists who spend their days plodding along ploughed tracks and open fields, hoping to disturb the tedium by unearthing the fortune of a lifetime." —IMDB

Detectorists was written by and stars Mackenzie Crook—yeah, that guy from The Office, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Game of Thrones. The British series was also his directorial debut and something for which he earned a BAFTA TV award (Best Situation Comedy) in 2015. Season one is currently on Netflix, and since it's a lovely show featuring some gorgeous shots, I thought that I'd do a post full of pics & gifs.

All taken from episode one. Lots of pretty, pretty establishing shots.

Andy (Crook) and Lance (Toby Jones) working the fields. So panoramic. 😍

Still from S01's cold open. The writing is brilliant, too, and though kept to a minimum, it reveals a lot about these two characters.

End pre-credits, roll title sequence.

Jump to episode two for some B-roll and more est. shots.

Low angle 'hole' shot (see trunk shot).

Cold open from E03 using a long shot before transitioning into a medium shot with rack focus. 

Close-up on a Jim'll Fix It badge. Andy tosses the...interesting...find aside upon discovery.

The new age shop belonging to Lance's ex-wife, Maggie.
Despite the fact that it is full of clutter and tat akin to Lance's own metal-detecting finds, he seems out of place.

Rival detectorists, the Antiquisearchers.
Their placement within the shot suggests that they are a gang (of nerds).
🎶 Mise-en-scène, mise-en-scene...! 🎶

Extreme close-up establishing shots for the pub quiz scene in episode four.

At the start of E05, Andy is alone due to multiple shenanigans that took place in previous eps.
The sense of solitude is overwhelming in these shots of places where he used to hang out with his old friend.

Yup.

Blending into the scenery, Lance obviously misses his best pal, too. Very atmospheric.

By the season finale our characters have come full circle.

You never know what's hiding underfoot...

The second season is rather good, as well, although I'm not one for bonus Christmas specials. Anyhow, hopefully it hits Netflix or another streaming service sometime soon. If not, I'm sure ya'll can get creative. ;-)

For more information:

• Detectorists on IMDB
• Beautiful theme song by musician Johnny Flynn